Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @12:18PM
from the who's-going-to-see-this dept.

A growing number of colleges are providing graduating students tools to improve their online image. The services arrange for positive results on search engine inquiries by pushing your party pictures, and other snapshots of your lapsed judgement off the first page. Syracuse, Rochester and Johns Hopkins are among the schools that are offering such services free of charge. From the article: "Samantha Grossman wasn't always thrilled with the impression that emerged when people Googled her name.
'It wasn't anything too horrible,' she said. 'I just have a common name. There would be pictures, college partying pictures, that weren't of me, things I wouldn't want associated with me.'
So before she graduated from Syracuse University last spring, the school provided her with a tool that allowed her to put her best Web foot forward. Now when people Google her, they go straight to a positive image — professional photo, cum laude degree and credentials — that she credits with helping her land a digital advertising job in New York."

Facebook is one example of a site that has a crappy policy that only allows you to have one profile. It makes sense to have two social media profiles, one for your personal life which you share with friends, post your party pictures and aren't afraid to write whatever you want, and one for your professional life, where you add coworkers and talk about work.

Yet Facebook and other sites are forbidding this, making people put everything in one pot. It's becoming more difficult to separate your personal life from your professional life these days. Stupid real name policies and pervasive connection of everything to everything else is a curse.

We need a push towards policies that make it easy for people to keep personal and work lives separate. It's common sense.

Facebook is one example of a site that has a crappy policy that only allows you to have one profile. It makes sense to have two social media profiles, one for your personal life which you share with friends, post your party pictures and aren't afraid to write whatever you want, and one for your professional life, where you add coworkers and talk about work.

Maybe Facebook could let you organize your social media contacts into different "circles" and let you share content based on which "circle" a person in. They could keep the membership of those "circles" private so no one knows which circle they are in or who else in in that circle.

Someone should start a social media site like that! [google.com] It's sure to be a Facebook killer.

Maybe Facebook could let you organize your social media contacts into different "lists" and let you share content based on which "list" a person in. They could keep the membership of those "lists" private so no one knows which circle they are in or who else in in that circle.

That doesn't help with publically accessible material that gets indexed by Google. Secondly, Facebook does have that sort of functionality and it had it before Google. The only thing google did was simplify things to give potential users the impression they care about your privacy, which, imo, is a bit of a joke.

That doesn't help with publically accessible material that gets indexed by Google. Secondly, Facebook does have that sort of functionality and it had it before Google. The only thing google did was simplify things to give potential users the impression they care about your privacy, which, imo, is a bit of a joke.

Well, yeah, if you make your data available to the public (if Google's search engine indexes it, it's available to the world), then your data is available to the public. No technology is going to help you with that - if you don't want it public, don't make it public. Facebook does have a way of making pictures of you public without your permission by letting others tag you in photos, but I think there's a setting to prevent that. Not sure if Google has the same functionality.

Since it sounds like it's basically a SEO service I made the assumption it's about publically available data. But you are right about data leak. I assume if you make it available to friends and their account is wide open then you're in trouble but I'm not sure you can do much about that without asking friends to change their settings.

I think there are some questions about that on both facebook and google plus which is why I don't use my real name and don't talk about personsal things.

There should, of course, be nine circles. One for your sex life, one about money, one where you put all your rants, one for all things heretical, etc. Hmm, which one is it where everyone has to be doused in faeces? Oh, and of course Mark Zuckerberg himself will be in the centre of the ninth.

There should, of course, be nine circles. One for your sex life, one about money, one where you put all your rants, one for all things heretical, etc. Hmm, which one is it where everyone has to be doused in faeces? Oh, and of course Mark Zuckerberg himself will be in the centre of the ninth.

That circle is the intersection of your "girl" circle and "cup" circle.

Except that's not the issue. There are plenty of sites that are "just work" equivalents of Facebook, or else have potential to be, like LinkedIn, or more focused ones like ResearchGate or CiteULike. But employers DEMAND access to the personal stuff. Otherwise there would be no problem: If an employer found a picture of you drinking or partying, then they would know to simply not take that into consideration. However, the issue is not that they do so, but it still subliminally affects them, but that they act

So instead of complaining about not doing two things in one place (which might make it easier for someone to find both profiles swirling around, and let fbook know both your jekyll an d hyde personas), have it be that
Facebook is one of your two or more social media profiles. :>) At my school, Facebook is what your parents are on, so your profile on Facebook is the clean parentally approvable appearance of life: what you show to your parents may not be what you show to your friends on other networks or t

I just keep my personal info completely off anything public on the internet. Tada, zero results (other than whitepages-style listings for people who aren't me). I don't have a Facebook account, my Google account has a fake name, etc. What a coincidence, I don't have problems like this.

That wouldn't solve her problem, which is that somebody with her exact name had been a very bad girl online. In that case, it makes sense to create a "clean" persona and attempt to push that to the top.

I take arty (yes, that kind of arty) pictures as a hobby. Luckily my name is quite common, so a google search turns up loads of other people with the same name, so I'd be quite hard to track down even though I publish under my own name (to be honest, I'm at a stage in my career when if someone doesn't want to employ me because of my hobbies, I don't want to work for them).

When I google my real name, I get several Facebook pages, and at least one LinkedIn that aren't me. I have to go to the second page to find a stupid question on some tech list that, er wait I didn't write that question!

I share a name with a celebrity so i'm in the same situation. Unless you know my nick, you don't find me. If you do, you can probably find quite a bit, but i'm careful to make sure no employers or clients know my nick. I keep an alternate email and so forth for that.

Hey. She can play the same game if she really wants to that much. Somehow I don't think it's likely. Until HR people can grow brains and stop disqualifying people for stupid shit, this sort of SEO assholery is going to be necessary.

TFA suggests that a third of the HR folks surveyed admitted to dismissing a candidate in light of the results that came out of researching the candidate on the web.
Great, so now in order to get a job I have to not only be good at my job but also I have to hope that the HR person doing the online screening is good at doing theirs.
This also bodes evil for people who choose not to indulge in online social stuff at all. Now, the only possible hits are people who are not them. So in order to compete for jobs

It's not far-fetched. The potential employers have no knowledge that they need to distinguish the Samantha-the-naughty-party-girl from Samantha-the-cum-laude-graduate search results. So what she needed was a professional photo and professional image so that when the unknown searchers looked for her, they would see pictures of two different looking people.

She also can't tell her potential employers to "search for Samantha -drinking -at -the -foobar -lounge", because that's going to leave them with a bad im

Though some tech jobs might look down at not having a web presence. Perhaps you're out of touch with the electronic world? Perhaps you don't know about social apps, communities, web 2.0, whatever "buzz words" HR might look for.

I'm not saying it's true, just that it could be perceived as true by the HR guys that filter the resumes before they get sent to the department. While other people might look favorably on that for a candidate: security conscious and what-not.

It reminds of a job I applied for, I knew the person hiring (not an underling, the flippin' manager). He said for legal reasons I had to submit my resume through their official channels but once it got to his department he'd help me out. A few weeks go by and he asks why I didn't follow up with the job, I told him I did. He was puzzled, and came back to me later -- the HR department weeded mine out because I "only" had X years experience with.Net. They were weeding out people who didn't have Y+ years experience with.Net... which was "awesome" because they wanted 10+ years with.Net and it had only officially been out for a couple.

Well, it's about cost-benefit analysis, isn't it? For you, the liabilities of exposing yourself on the Web outweigh the benefits. Not true for others. Then, there's the group that doesn't understand either, but that's their problem...

I know this is slashdot, and people don't want to read the article, the company that she got a job with is not mentioned in the article. She is just profiled as one of the students using the reputation cleanup service provided by the University. This is in fact a University pushed story since it is college application time, to advertise one of the fringe benefits of the University. The company mentioned was actually created by three of the University Alumni.

So we define positive in terms of social stigma? God forbid you would be associated with having some social accumen and having a good time. Its always a negative to find out someone has ever been to a party with alcohol.

I don't see whats so negative.... some people could hold anything against you. Do you really want to work for/with such people?

You are confusing your utopian vision with the real world. How people should judge others is unimportant. How they *do* judge others is. So long as potential employers are judging you, you would do well to play the game and act like the most professional and dull person in the world. Unless you enjoy going back to your parents and begging to be allowed to live in the basement again.

However its a feedback loop of social acceptability. Not too many years back, you wouldn't o to work without a suit on in many professions, thats changed. In fact, I have even had people say to me, wearing cargo pants and a T-shirt, that they are "surprized I can go to work like that". What changed? Perception within the company.

If good people hide the fact that they are real people, then they reinforce these perceptions. Every person who likes to party is betraying everyone else who likes a good party when

wearing cargo pants and a T-shirt, that they are "surprized I can go to work like that".
Yeah, and what was acceptable and unacceptable has actually switched places in a couple of cases. It used to be that wearing a polo was considered fashionable and a T-shirt slovenly. Now, I have people looking down their nose at my polo and suggesting that I wear a T-Shirt instead. But of course it has to be a hip trendy T-shirt, not the the T-shirts which I actually own.

So long as potential employers are judging you, you would do well to play the game and act like the most professional and dull person in the world. Unless you enjoy going back to your parents and begging to be allowed to live in the basement again.

While this is sadly true for many people, it really depends on your bargaining position. If you are good at what you do and do something which is in good demand -- meaning that you are in a position where you can be somewhat picky about which jobs you take, then this may not matter at all. If I was to be dismissed for a job I applied for on the base of some online pictures of me drinking, then that picture would have likely served a good purpose, as I probably wouldn't have liked working at that place anywa

This is arguably against Googles guidelines - and I have seen some dubious link directories that appear to be run the insiders in side universitys that try and leverage the high value and trust assigned to a.edu domain.

Agreed, I would hope Google catches onto this and stops it. People need to realise it's not only their name and people want to be able to find the other people with that name too.
Yes, for every one person looking for "Good Samantha" I can guarantee that a dozen are more interested in finding "Bad Samantha".

It's hardly difficult to do, you know... and whoever you kicked off of the front page can readily jump back onto it if he or she desires. Methinks it's fair play. If anything, Google should be the target of your disapproval, for clustering results more than they should be, or showing potentially embarrassing results to computers that google full names all day long. (In fact, I'm actually surprised that no US citizen has tried to sue Google over it yet.)

It's hardly difficult to do, you know... and whoever you kicked off of the front page can readily jump back onto it if he or she desires. Methinks it's fair play.
Fair play says you. Race to the bottom, says I.

rather dark Grey in my opinion though it depends on the eye of the beholder and the Mighty Google tends to apply the "black" term to what they see fit. But take the example of a doctor who is struck off for negligence certainly suppressing that information is not in the public good

It's an advertisement for . They claim to use SEO techniques which are "white hat", but of course any SEO techniques that attempt to game google results tend to piss off Google, meaning that there's no such thing as "white hat" as far as Google is concerned.

Like most SEOs, this will get you good results for a short while until the back end comparison is made on Googles end to show graph deltas over time, and there's a huge shift in geometry on the particular search tems. At that point, the results she wan

It wasn't anything too horrible, Samantha Grossman said. I just have a common name. There would be pictures, college partying pictures, that weren't of me, things I wouldn't want associated with me.

So, how is this Samantha Grossman's prerogative to have exactly her pictures as the top result, instead of the other Samantha Grossmans, who now fret that there are pictures there that aren't associated with them?

I really hate how people think they're the only one who owns a name and therefore get exclusive rights to it. It biases search results and for those of us that want to look up the other Samantha, it screws us over. I hope google puts an end to this.

I party. People know I party. People have evidence that I party. YTF am I supposed to hide that? How about employers stop being prudes and hire humans. I can't stand the fact that the only way to make it through an interview these days is to lie and spout buzzwords. Why is corporate quick to hire squeaky-clean idiots over human beings that have had human experiences?

Why publishers/ad agencies often take English grads from oxbridge = we have an Oxford Alumni on our team (digital marketing for a FTSE100 company) - Bridget Jones worked in publishing and the diary has jokes about "wittgenstein"

Why publishers/ad agencies often take English grads from oxbridge = we have an Oxford Alumni on our team (digital marketing for a FTSE100 company) - Bridget Jones worked in publishing and the diary has jokes about "wittgenstein"

It would have been nice if Samantha Grossman's "cum laude degree" taught her something about chronological order. Because her resume [wordpress.com] certainly doesn't display that. Add in the fact that she's advertising that she's a member of a social sorority and has a "fun fact" of "having the most social media profiles", and her resume would go straight into my circular file,. . .

It's even better with me. My name is shared with a celebrity, so nobody ever finds me by directly searching for me unless they already have my nickname, which I would never give to a prospective employer or client.

Indeed some HR departments (and US ones tend to be worst culprits) have ideas above there station eg Drug tests and back ground checks for some bog standard little development job - you imagine the HR director spends his weekend dressing up as the SAS/Seal team 6/SAD and running round the woods with a paint ball gun

This level of intrusion for job seekers is only really required/justified for a very small subset of jobs eg those with SC or TS (DV) clearance

Matter of time. Right now, the economy sucks. Employers have their pick of candidates, but also hundreds to choose from. It's impractical to interview so many, so they need to apply some heuristics to narrow the field. Quick and good-enough tests that'll eliminate the undesireables. The 'google check' is one of these, along with mostly-automated 'must have qualification X' standards.

Actually it is better to have some "good" images set to public on your facebook page, because if you use your real name (and don't set your privacy settings to hide) it is almost guaranteed to come up on the first page and you can use it to make yourself look good. Setting up an empty Google+ account designed to make you look good is also useful as no one uses it, but it usually appears on the first page of goolge.
That is far more effective in the OP's case because it was someone else with the same name th